Privacy Policy

Sowa Answers is a product of Lesniak Advisory, a sole proprietorship registered in the Province of Ontario, Canada (Ontario BIN 1001490274), with its registered business address at 208 Tremont Road, London, Ontario, N5V1C4. The legal entity responsible for the Sowa Answers service — the website, AI receptionist, call and SMS handling, dashboard, and related features — is Lesniak Advisory. For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, "we," "us," and "our" refer to Lesniak Advisoryin its capacity as operator of Sowa Answers, and references to "Sowa Answers" identify the product offered to customers.

We collect information from two groups of people:

From our customers (business owners who sign up for Sowa Answers): email address, name, business name, phone number, business address, booking link, business hours, a free-trial payment method via Stripe, subscription status, dashboard login events, and preferences you set in the dashboard (notification choices, conversion strategy, transfer phone, training URLs).

From callers and SMS senderscontacting your Sowa number: the caller's phone number, a real-time transcript of what was said, an AI-generated summary and tags, any appointment or contact details the caller shares, and any SMS content you and the caller exchange through the Sowa number. This content is stored in your dashboard so you can follow up.

When a caller reaches a phone number connected to Sowa, the AI receptionist speaks a short disclosure at the start of the call so the caller is informed that:

• they are speaking with an AI assistant, not a human;
• the call is being transcribed; and
• the call content is shared with the business owner through the Sowa dashboard.

Transcripts and AI-generated summaries are stored in your account's Sowa dashboard. Call audio is processed in real time to produce the transcript and is not retained. AI summaries and urgency tags are produced automatically and may contain mistakes; owners review them before acting. If you operate in a jurisdiction that requires all-party consent, you are responsible for understanding and complying with that requirement in how you publish your phone number and receive calls.

We use a small number of trusted vendors to actually run the service. These are "sub-processors" in the sense that they handle personal information on our behalf under contract. As of the last-updated date at the top of this page they are:

• Anthropic — primary AI language model for call conversation. Receives call transcripts to generate real-time responses.
• Cartesia — text-to-speech voice synthesis. Receives response text to produce the agent voice played on calls.
• Deepgram — speech-to-text transcription and turn detection. Receives live call audio to produce transcripts.
• LiveKit — real-time voice orchestration and audio transport. Manages the live call session between the caller and the AI receptionist.
• Telnyx — telephony carrier. Handles inbound PSTN calls and SMS. Holds phone numbers, call and message metadata, and short-term audio streams in transit.
• Groq — LLM fallback only. Used when the primary language model is unavailable.
• OpenAI — powers the Sowa Chat assistant on our website only. OpenAI does not receive call audio, transcripts, or any data from inbound calls.
• Stripe — payment processing, subscription billing, and tax calculation. Holds customer payment details and billing address.
• Sentry — application error monitoring. Receives error reports and stack traces; we configure it to exclude call content from error payloads.
• Resend — transactional email delivery (onboarding, trial reminders, receipts).
• Cloudflare — bot protection (Turnstile CAPTCHA on public-facing forms). Receives request metadata for bot scoring; does not receive call content.
• Vercel — application hosting. Canadian region (Montreal, yul1).
• Supabase — Postgres database, authentication, and object storage. Stores your account data, caller contact records, and transcripts. Canadian region (ca-central-1).

We do not use call audio, transcripts, or message content to train shared / third-party AI models. Our sub-processor agreements prohibit that use.

Our database is hosted exclusively in Supabase's Canada (ca-central-1) region. Application servers are hosted on Vercel in the Montreal (yul1) region. Persistent customer data does not leave Canada.

The remaining sub-processors listed above process data primarily in the United States: Anthropic, Cartesia, Deepgram, Telnyx, Groq, OpenAI, Stripe, Sentry, and Resend. LiveKit and Cloudflare operate on global edge networks. This means call audio in transit, transcription data, and real-time conversation data may pass through US-based infrastructure. By using Sowa Answers, you acknowledge this. We contractually require each sub-processor to apply security and confidentiality safeguards at least equivalent to what we describe in this policy.

If you have concerns about cross-border data handling for a specific deployment, email us at privacy@sowaanswers.com and we will tell you which regions apply to your account.

Sowa Answers is Canadian-operated. We handle personal information in line with applicable Canadian law, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) federally, and provincial privacy legislation where applicable, including Quebec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (Law 25), Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), and British Columbia's PIPA. Where a customer or caller shares health information that falls under Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) or another provincial health privacy statute, the customer remains the health-information custodian and we act only as an information manager / electronic service provider for that customer.

Commercial electronic messages we send (account, billing, and onboarding emails) follow Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL): every message identifies us, includes a Canadian mailing address, and gives you a way to unsubscribe.

We collect, use and disclose personal information for the purposes described in this policy, or with your consent, or as otherwise permitted or required by law.

We retain your data for as long as your account is active and afterwards only as needed for legal, accounting, security, and legitimate-interest reasons. Approximate retention windows:

• Account profile — kept while the account is active. On closure, deleted or anonymized within 90 days, except where we must retain billing/tax records by law.
• Call transcripts, summaries, and message history — kept for the life of the account so you can search your inbox. You can request earlier deletion (see "Your Rights").
• Billing and tax records — retained for up to seven (7) years as required by Canadian tax law.
• Operational logs (call events, webhook deliveries, push/SMS delivery receipts) — typically up to 12 months.

We protect data with access controls, row-level security at the database layer, TLS in transit, encryption at rest by our hosting providers, rate limiting on public endpoints, restricted admin surfaces, and an incident-response runbook.

You may ask us to:

• confirm what personal information we hold about you;
• correct inaccurate personal information;
• provide a copy of your personal information in a readable format;
• delete your personal information, subject to our retention obligations (e.g. billing records required by law); and
• withdraw consent where we rely on consent.

If you are a caller or SMS sender (not an account holder) and you want a business to delete the record of your call or message, contact the business owner first — they control the account. If you cannot reach them, contact us at privacy@sowaanswers.com and we will help mediate.

To exercise a right, email privacy@sowaanswers.com from the address associated with your account (or include information that lets us verify you). We will respond within a reasonable time, generally within 30 days. Our use of your data is also subject to our Terms of Service.

Questions about this policy or your data? Use our contact form or email us at privacy@sowaanswers.com. For other legal inquiries, email legal@sowaanswers.com.

Operator / data controller: Lesniak Advisory, a business registered in Ontario, Canada (the legal entity behind the Sowa Answers product).
Data subject rights and requests: direct to Lesniak Advisory via the Privacy contact email above.
Mailing address: 208 Tremont Road, London, Ontario, N5V1C4.